As he had hugged Archie goodbye before heading out for the evening, he pretended that he was saying goodbye after a weekend visit and leaving his boy for a week, just to see how it felt.

It hurt.

The clock in the hallway had displayed midnight by the time he returned. The tick-tick-tick of its hands seemed to reprimand him.

Liar-liar-liar.

He had hesitated. His foot on the bottom step, his fingers lightly resting on the bannister. He couldn’t climb into bed with his wife, not smelling of another woman’s perfume. Not when the smell would be so familiar to her. Instead, he had spent a restless night on the couch.

George doesn’t call out as he enters the house, he doesn’t quite know what to say. How to sound. The TV is on in the lounge, Archie cross-legged on the floor and glued to Shrek. George frowns. Archie hadn’t seemed unwell when he’d kissed him goodbye early that morning and by the way he is dipping his hand into a bag of Pom Bears, crunching the crisps, he probably isn’t ill. Instead of disturbing him, George wanders into the kitchen, in search of his wife. Leah is sitting at the table, studying something on her laptop.

For a moment George drinks her in. The way her soft hair hangs like a glossy sheet down her back, the sun through the window picking out natural golden highlights among the red. She really is beautiful. A one-of-a-kind gasp-in-surprise when she walks into a room type. Except she isn’t a one-off. Marie is almost identical although she has entirely different hair. An entirely different personality. His sister-in-law intrudes into his thoughts far more frequently than he’d like nowadays.

As George crosses the kitchen he can see Leah is watching the press coverage from her original case on YouTube. He feels a mixture of sadness and anger that their boy is alone in the lounge while Leah has again stepped into the past.

‘Hi.’ George ignores the way she flinches when she became aware of his presence.

He holds out BP garage’s finest peace offering. ‘Are you okay?’ he asks, although she clearly isn’t. Her eyes are bloodshot and red-rimmed as though she’s been crying for hours and he wonders if he’s been the cause of that or if it is something else.

Hurriedly, Leah slams the lid of the laptop down with her gloved hand before opening it again slightly. She repeats this ritual twice more, lightning fast, all the while unable to look George in the eye. It takes seconds and a casual observer might not have noticed, but George feels panic rising.

Threes.

He hadn’t realized she was quite so bad.

Again.

She pushes the computer angrily away. George feels she’s pushing him away. He feels alone, not like last night with arms and legs wrapped around him. Soft breath and warm moans in his ears.

‘Why isn’t Archie at nursery?’ he asks.

‘He’s out’ is all she says flatly and at first George is confused. Archie is out? What does that mean? But then she says, ‘Graham McDonald called to tell me,’ and he realizes why she was watching YouTube.